Community

At this point, it takes at least 4-5 emails and telephone calls before I can hope for resolution of a single issue with any of the five banks and financial institutions I deal with regularly. I'd be more than happy if they can provide 'first call resolution'. 

I can quite imagine how people in marketing and PR departments of many banks and FIs might be monitoring Twitter tweets and Facebook updates of their competitors' customers - there are tools being launched for specifically this purpose. However, I'm not sure how long it would take for banks and FIs to overcome their inertia and deploy social media in their operations department for monitoring and resolving customer complaints or whether the social media buzz itself would be alive for that long. 

I agree that investors would like corporates to explain things in simple and understandable terms. As to how feasible that is, let me point to this NPR article according to which (1) Jargon is inevitable in contracts, and (2) Contracts would become 2-3X longer by avoiding legalese. Although this article refers specifically to credit card agreements, I don't think it's too far off the ballpark in our current context of investor rights, responsibilities and other elements of corporate governance.   

@Brett K: 

Your post is an excellent guide for "how to innovate". 

Ever since Amazon was founded, we've been hearing about how its disruptive model would alter the status quo in the book retailing industry, but it has taken some 15-odd years for a Borders moment to occur. And, well before that, we've seen WebVan, WebMD and several other innovators flame out. While organizational change might be a long drawn out affair, changes in consumer behavior don't happen overnight either. 

This brings us to the equally important question of "why innovate", especially in highly-regulated industries and in ones where not too many players seem to be doing it anyway. As long as companies are under the pressure to meet quarterly numbers or else face the wrath of Wall Street, innovators will continue to be weighed down by naysayers in their midst posing this question.

I think the way out is to package innovative products and services in bite-size chunks and aim for 'early wins' so that there's a win-win for all parties concerned.  

I agree that more investor education will help. However, the key questions are:

1. How many investors have the time and inclination to undergo such education, especially when many of them - including me! - don't even bother to spare the time to read shareholder announcements or submit proxy votes, let alone attend AGMs in person?
2. Is the company, or even the FS industry, the right entity to impart such education? Regulators might fit the role better. 

Personally, I believe that investors - including institutional shareholders - should let the company's executives do what's best for customers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders including shareholders. If they are not satisfied with the results, they can always go to the stockmarkets. Given that executive compensation in most corporates is linked to stock price performance, investors' ability to hammer down a company's stock price bestows them with a good control over corporates.

Increase in EPS generally boosts share price regardless of whether it came about via share buyback or some other means. More than lack of knowledge or clever sales pitch, this fact could could explain why most shareholders choose the "do nothing" option and let company managements push through motions for share buybacks. 

@ Arseniy K:

Okay, got it now. Thanks.

You might find HEATMAP360 useful in this context. It provides realtime social media sentiment of products / companies.  

@ Arseniy K:

Interesting, but, when it comes to trading, the risks of insider trading seem to loom large.  

Perhaps you could cite an example or two of using real-time news from real eye-witnesses that won't amount to insider-trading?

This is specifically relevant in these days when we're hearing a lot about the insider-trading charges faced by Rajratnam of Galleon for trading on Goldman Sachs stock on the basis of the information supplied by "eye-witness" Rajat Gupta a few minutes after the board meeting he attended, and well before WSJ reported it the next morning. Only this happened via good-old telephone, rather than Twitter / FourSquare.

Kudos to UK's Treasury select committee for its move.

Germany is no lighthouse for abolition of cheques. To say that cheques have almost completely vanished in Germany fails to reflect the full picture of retail payments in that country, if not also in Austria, Switzerland, Belgium and Holland.   

For one, cheques were never popular in Germany even ten years ago.

What was - and I suspect still is - popular is a paper-based alternative called Ueberweisungsauftrag. This tongue twister in German language is a piece of paper that's completed and signed by the payer in "wet ink" as the first step of initiating a payment. Although the bank processes it as an electronic payment and the payee receives direct credit into their bank account with no effort from their side, this is as much a paper-based instrument as a cheque when seen from the payer's perspective - which is exactly the affected constituency the Treasury select committee has on its radar. 

The situation with small business corporate payments was not greatly different either. In fact, if we used the bank's standard preprinted Ueberweisungsauftrag paper form, there were no fees. However, if we resorted to more cool / hip / green alternatives (e.g., email or printout of multiple payments on a single page printed on the company letterhead and sent by fax or snail-mail), the bank would slap a fee of 5 DM / EUR per payment.

No matter which way the debate goes in UK, the government should regulate that banks must continue to offer at least one cheque-substitute ePayment instrument that is fee-free. I know most banks don't charge for FPS and BACS now, but the same should continue even after cheques are abolished. 

Frankly, the very notion that regulators with their shoestring budget can do a meaningful code review of algo trading software that's the outcome of tens, if not hundreds, of million dollars in investment by investment banking firms, sounds a bit strange to me.    

Not sure if the report has a separate category for it, but theft of Personally Identifiable Information (PII) belonging to millions of customers from the databases of banks and payments service providers should play a major role in identity theft. While it's relatively easy to keep an individual PC updated with all the latest security updates, DBAs have traditionally faced an uphill task in doing the same on FI and PSP database(s). 

It appears that there are technologies available which permit databases to stay un-patched - for a variety of practical constraints found in many large IT landscapes - and yet protect them from SQL injection, buffer overflow, and other techniques traditionally used to steal PII stored in them.